Yeah, yeah, been like three weeks or something, but like I said in that other thread, I like to do things right, which means waiting until I have a good, solid chunk of time I can devote to writing to make every new chapter as coherent and good as I can. It sounds lazy, but really it's just how I work. In any case, this one's pretty long compared to some of the previous ones I've been doing, partly out of compensation for taking so long ("if you're going to make them wait unreasonably, give them more for it") and partly because of what I'm having to tell in this one. It's definitely not a filler chapter.
---------------------------------------------------
"Well, this is pleasant," Marril grumbled. She was sneaking through the empty hallways of the Neo League Stadium with Sam and David. "You'd think they'd have at least given us a few other people to work with."
"You're saying you're not a one-person army or something?" Sam prodded Marril.
Marril groaned. She looked behind her to David, who said nothing.
Sam grumbled something to herself, and stopped suddenly. Marril's reflexes made her stop at about the exact moment Sam did, but David, lost in thought, continued a few paces before realizing everyone else had stopped.
"What?" Marril asked.
Sam looked around. "I think we may be lost."
"Lost?" Marril asked.
"This place has a really stupid floor plan, okay?" Sam sounded like she wasn't proud at all to admit that she was lost.
"We were told that they'd be on the roof," Marril scratched her head. "So just a case of heading up."
Sam indicated the empty corridors. "Good luck with that."
"Well, this place is built around a really large arena, right?" Marril asked.
"With surprisingly few stairs."
"Well, there are stairs heading up nearly to the top for the highest seats," Marril couldn't help but smirk.
"Yeah, and a good solid wall to get to the actual roof," Sam added.
"I am psychic," David said quietly, shrugging, and putting his hands in his pockets.
"Was thinking of that," Marril said. She didn't mention aloud that David almost managed to bring down a building when he went crazy after initially discovering his psychic powers, the latter part of which was why she didn't bring it up.
"Just not pleasant to have to tell everyone," David shrugged.
"Anyway," Sam said, heading down the hall to the entrance to the stands, "We should get going. If Kenneth was right, and apparently he always is, we're stuck for time."
Following about a foot behind Sam, for no real reason past wanting to be annoying and help diffuse the tense situation, Marril said nothing as she followed Sam to the doors to the coliseum. David's footsteps were unusually silent, since Marril could barely hear them.
Sam opened the doors and tried not to look down at the arena itself. It wasn't out of a lack of curiosity. Rather, it was out of a complete abundance of curiosity. She didn't want to get distracted by seeing what was going on with Alex.
She glanced backwards at Marril and David. The latter had a rather strange expression on his face, like he didn't have any problems sensing what was going on down there.
"Anything wrong?" Sam asked.
"No," David was obviously lying.
"We both know you better than that," Marril said. "So spill it."
"It's Team Rocket's genetic Pokémon, the one you helped create," David told Sam. "It's... overpowering, psychically."
"It's that strong?" Sam asked, stopping.
"Oh yeah," David winced. "It's like trying to swim in a waterfall. Giving me a headache, too."
"Can you block it out?" Marril asked.
David chuckled hollowly. "No, the way your brain works when you're psychic... it's constantly on, like a TV that can't shut off."
"Nice analogy," Sam said idly. "Anyway, we should get going."
They quickly reached the top of the stairs between the rows and rows of seats. From there, the arena itself was tiny, such that you couldn't really see what was going on down there, unless someone used some large Pokémon like a Wailord.
There was still about three or four metres of stone wall behind the top row of seats, which seemed insurmountable. Sam reminded herself that the place was indeed converted from an old coliseum, but that didn't mean she had to like the architecture any.
"Well?" Marril asked David.
"Yes, yes," David said. He didn't look all that confident. "Why do we even need to get up on the roof, again?"
"One of Kenneth's hunches," Sam said. "One in a series of what has apparently been so far some scarily accurate hunches."
A gunshot broke the conversation, loud enough that Sam's ears rung, and scored a deep crack in the wall behind her. She counted herself lucky there was no shrapnel or anything. Before she even knew what she was doing, she ducked onto the stairs and took cover behind a seat.
A second gunshot rang, but there wasn't any impact sound. Sam looked over to David, who had his arm outstretched and a pained expression on his face. A small bullet was floating in front of his arm by about two or three metres. David looked like he was holding his breath, until he suddenly exhaled, dropped his arm, and the bullet whizzed past him.
Sam looked over to the shooter. It was a woman with blonde curls and a black miniskirted Team Rocket uniform, and a very ugly beret. This, if she remembered Kenneth's quick primer right, was Domino.
Domino lost no momentum, either, taking another shot at David, which missed. The look of fear on David's face was quite real, however. Domino then noticed Marril trying to sneak up on her and took yet another shot. Sam didn't know how strong Orthan Pokémon were, but she was pretty sure Marril couldn't withstand a shot.
Marril's reaction speed was insane, Sam noticed, as the shot went completely wide as Marril ducked off to the side. She took a deep breath and landed an Ice Beam right on Domino's right hand. Domino screamed as it was encased in a block of ice, frantically smashing the block against the coliseum wall.
"She can't take it," Marril snickered mockingly at Domino.
"Screw you," Domino grumbled, reaching with her left hand behind her, but Marril nailed that too with an Ice Beam. Marril rushed at Domino and ducked low, sweeping her leg out and tripping her to the ground.
"You people are what made me like this," Marril said with venom in her voice.
"You going to finish me or not?" Domino winced. Sam could tell the cold was unbearable, and she could imagine. She'd had frostbite before, but actually having parts of your body encased in ice would be far worse.
"Not unless David wants to," Marril shrugged at David. "I'm not a killer... I'm better than you."
David smiled weakly at this, and Sam knew exactly why.
"Hey, Sam," David said, "How long do you figure it'd take for a whole block of ice to melt in this weather?"
Domino's eyes grew wide.
"Quite a long time," Sam got David's implication.
"It'd hurt quite a lot, too," Marril snickered. She took a deep breath and breathed out an Ice Beam at Domino, who was cowering, looking exceedingly afraid, and chanting a quiet mantra of "not my day, not my day" to herself. Marril left Domino's head and most of her chest unfrozen so she could still breathe.
"Come on," Marril said with a distinctly malevolent glint in her eyes, "Let's go."
When they got a fair enough ways away that Domino was out of earshot, Sam asked, "You know what we just did there, right?"
"Subjected a Rocket Elite to what could be hours of nonstop pain and lingering frostbite that'll have her suffering for days?" Marril shrugged.
Sam winced. She hadn't expected Marril to be quite so blunt.
"Sam," David sounded like he didn't quite know how to put what he was thinking into words, "Not everything can be so idealistic... Domino was a Rocket Elite, she knew what she was in for when she took the job. She did things, worse things, to others. In simple terms, she was an enemy, and this isn't the time to worry about right and wrong. You just have to do what you have to do, and not question it."
"That's wartime logic," Sam grumbled.
"Being shot at is a pretty clear indication of war," Marril pointed out, stopping to stretch. She leaned against the wall and continued, "Domino didn't look like she much cared if David lived or died. She also didn't seem to care where she aimed at me, either. I don't think she'd give any mercy to you either."
"Doesn't mean we have to be cruel," Sam pointed out.
"Cruel is relative... neither of us wanted to kill her," David remarked. "She didn't seem like she'd care if any of us died."
"We should get going," Marril said, a certain seriousness now in her voice.
"Fine," Sam didn't like the idea of letting it hang like that, but she didn't want to get too involved and let anything bad happen either. She looked around. "Kenneth said Vashou and Buson would be on this level."
David closed his eyes. Sam wasn't sure how David was going to find them, but he pointed forward and said, "They're over that way, on top of the coliseum."
"Think you can lift us up there?" Sam asked.
"I'll try," David didn't sound all that confident. His eyes flashed the creepy blue they did whenever he performed anything telekinetic.
Nothing happened.
David growled to himself and closed his eyes.
Nothing happened.
"Goddish damn it," David growled, sounding exceedingly frustrated. "I can't manage anything. Not with that... thing down there."
"That bad, eh?" Marril said. She stopped to think for a few moments, then took a step forward. "I have an idea."
"Go ahead," David shrugged.
Marril crouched down and pondered the situation. She said, "This is going to be messy" and stood up, taking three distinct steps back. Sam knew Marril was going to do something very messy indeed if she'd admitted to it, so she gave Marril a ton of clearance. David didn't seem to catch on to this.
Taking a few strange, DDR-like dance steps, Marril whirled around and a wave of water came up around her. She swept her arm out, and the wave struck the wall with a thud. Not losing any momentum, Marril swept her left arm out and a blizzard struck the wave, freezing it on the spot.
David, not having given Marril enough room, was thoroughly soaked.
Sam was not.
"Well," Marril said, turning around and indicating her handiwork, with a very annoying grin reminescent of one of Kenneth's on her face, "What do you think of that?"
"I think I'm wet," David said.
"Well, no helping that," Marril looked over the large mass of ice. "Gimme a sec and I'll even make some handholds in this."
Marril got to work breaking off the icicles and knocking some good-sized indentations into the thing with her hand. Sam wondered if it hurt any, but remembered something about Marril not really being able to feel any kind of acute pain.
"There," Marril said when she'd finished. "We should be able to get up now."
Sam wondered if she'd fall at all as she strode up to the thing and began the climb up. It wasn't any great height but she was quite averse to pain. Falling would cause that.
"You could move a bit faster, you know," Marril said from on top of the coliseum walls. Sam muttered to herself and pulled herself all the way up.
It was quite windy at the top, was the first thing she noticed. The second was that the wall, about two or three metres wide, seemed impossibly narrow from this height. The multiple-story drop to the pavement below didn't seem that enticing, either. Sam didn't really worry too much about her footing, as she was more concerned irrationally about the air drag from her open jacket putting a large enough unbalanced force on her enough to knock her over, or worse, off the wall.
"Well, would you look at that," Marril was crouched down on one knee and was squinting across the coliseum. "Over there, look, two Rockets setting up some kind of sniper rifle."
"A sniper rifle?" Sam wondered aloud. That definitely wasn't Team Rocket's style. It seemed excessively bloody and violent. Then again, Kenneth had established nothing if not that Team Rocket's style was changing because of these Elites.
"We should get going," Marril said. It was weird seeing her in a completely businesslike demeanour.
"Think we'd have any better luck with our Pokémon?" Sam asked. "Gilgamesh could probably—"
"A Dragonite is going to get noticed," Marril cut Sam off. "Mercury would work well. David, Graveler."
"At least we know who's in charge," David mumbled as he took a pokéball off his belt and dropped it unceremoniously to the ground. His Graveler came out with a slight flash, and the ball returned to David's hand.
Sam didn't like it, but she reluctantly dug out Mercury's pokéball and called out her Metang.
"Okay, Graveler," David said, "We're going to do this psychically."
"Graveler?" It asked.
"Just means I'm going to direct this psychically. It's faster than shouting orders."
"Grav," the Pokémon nodded.
"Mercury, you and Graveler should be at the front," Sam said. "I know that they're probably packing guns, and that it hurts a lot to be hit by one, but you two can take a bullet and live. Rest of us can't."
"Tang," Metang's voice was suprisingly deep.
"Come on," Marril said. "We should hurry this up."
This was definitely one of those moments where you just look at what you're doing and wonder not only why you're doing it but how you got there in the first place. When she first left Cerulean six years before, she'd never imagined she'd be on top of the Neo League Stadium, getting ready to jump two Rocket Elites in the name of one Rocket Executive, alongside a psychic and a Pokémon genetic experiment done by Team Rocket itself.
Way too much Team Rocket influence, Sam noted.
"Okay, let's go," Marril said for about the second or third time.
Time seemed to stand still for Sam as the world moved around her. Moving in midair was like moving through a fog as she followed Mercury and Graveler over the large wall of the coliseum towards the Rocket Elites.
The taller of the two, the blonde one, which Sam guessed was Buson, noticed them first. He turned his side to them and pulled a handgun out from his Team Rocket vest.
"Mercury, Protect!" Sam didn't even give the order consciously. It came from out of nowhere, but the glowing shield in front of Mercury stopped several bullets cold.
"Graveler, Rollout!" David shouted as the Protect faded.
Curling up into a tight ball, Graveler rolled forward at great speed, catching both Vashou and Buson off their feet and crushing the sniper emplacement they were setting up. Graveler halted, turned around, and came back at a startled Buson, pinning the man to the ground.
Marril's Ice Beam had already frozen Vashou to the ground. Sam really should have felt relieved, but she felt tense if anything. Sure they'd just beaten three Rocket Elites, but it seemed like their luck was going to run out at any moment.
"David," Sam said as the adrenaline began to wane ever so slightly, "I thought you couldn't do anything psychic with Tribo out there?"
"Not telekinetic," David explained. "Telepathic I can kind of do... saves the need to ask these two anything, though. The reason they were so distracted and didn't notice us was because they were talking to Elite Ryan down there," David indicated the coliseum arena, "and were trying to get this thing set up right. It's not pleasant what they were going to do."
"What was that?"
"Take out Kenneth, and try for Izumi and Mikhail before chaos set in and sniping became too hard."
Sam winced. David winced too, but for a different reason.
"What was that?" Sam asked.
"It's..." David's voice was fearful, but what he saw behind Sam had shut him up. "Oh Goddish."
Sam turned around. Marril looked dumbstruck. So, there it was, the most feared Pokémon on the planet, the Pokémon they had all secretly wished wouldn't come, had arrived. It was close enough to be visible, flying in low just above eye level with Sam. It passed by her without so much as a second glance, and headed in to the arena.
Mewtwo had come.
---------------------------------------------------
That's it for this week, folks. Next chapter goes up when it goes up. Until then, remember that this is not your kiddie Mewtwo we're talking about here. Anyway, like I noted several times in the narration (and I do love dramatic irony), I feel this one was a bit contrived, mainly that a 16-year old and an 18-year old (or 19-year old... embarrassing of me to forget like that) could beat three adult, experienced Rocket Elites, but that's just the overpoweredness of a psychic and an Orthan Pokémon (Marril sure hasn't been seen in a while, anyway) at work. Anyway, if anyone was wondering why David was able to deflect a bullet at the start, and unable to do anything later on, it's because Tribo was still fighting at that point, and wasn't able to full-out block things.
---------------------------------------------------
"Well, this is pleasant," Marril grumbled. She was sneaking through the empty hallways of the Neo League Stadium with Sam and David. "You'd think they'd have at least given us a few other people to work with."
"You're saying you're not a one-person army or something?" Sam prodded Marril.
Marril groaned. She looked behind her to David, who said nothing.
Sam grumbled something to herself, and stopped suddenly. Marril's reflexes made her stop at about the exact moment Sam did, but David, lost in thought, continued a few paces before realizing everyone else had stopped.
"What?" Marril asked.
Sam looked around. "I think we may be lost."
"Lost?" Marril asked.
"This place has a really stupid floor plan, okay?" Sam sounded like she wasn't proud at all to admit that she was lost.
"We were told that they'd be on the roof," Marril scratched her head. "So just a case of heading up."
Sam indicated the empty corridors. "Good luck with that."
"Well, this place is built around a really large arena, right?" Marril asked.
"With surprisingly few stairs."
"Well, there are stairs heading up nearly to the top for the highest seats," Marril couldn't help but smirk.
"Yeah, and a good solid wall to get to the actual roof," Sam added.
"I am psychic," David said quietly, shrugging, and putting his hands in his pockets.
"Was thinking of that," Marril said. She didn't mention aloud that David almost managed to bring down a building when he went crazy after initially discovering his psychic powers, the latter part of which was why she didn't bring it up.
"Just not pleasant to have to tell everyone," David shrugged.
"Anyway," Sam said, heading down the hall to the entrance to the stands, "We should get going. If Kenneth was right, and apparently he always is, we're stuck for time."
Following about a foot behind Sam, for no real reason past wanting to be annoying and help diffuse the tense situation, Marril said nothing as she followed Sam to the doors to the coliseum. David's footsteps were unusually silent, since Marril could barely hear them.
Sam opened the doors and tried not to look down at the arena itself. It wasn't out of a lack of curiosity. Rather, it was out of a complete abundance of curiosity. She didn't want to get distracted by seeing what was going on with Alex.
She glanced backwards at Marril and David. The latter had a rather strange expression on his face, like he didn't have any problems sensing what was going on down there.
"Anything wrong?" Sam asked.
"No," David was obviously lying.
"We both know you better than that," Marril said. "So spill it."
"It's Team Rocket's genetic Pokémon, the one you helped create," David told Sam. "It's... overpowering, psychically."
"It's that strong?" Sam asked, stopping.
"Oh yeah," David winced. "It's like trying to swim in a waterfall. Giving me a headache, too."
"Can you block it out?" Marril asked.
David chuckled hollowly. "No, the way your brain works when you're psychic... it's constantly on, like a TV that can't shut off."
"Nice analogy," Sam said idly. "Anyway, we should get going."
They quickly reached the top of the stairs between the rows and rows of seats. From there, the arena itself was tiny, such that you couldn't really see what was going on down there, unless someone used some large Pokémon like a Wailord.
There was still about three or four metres of stone wall behind the top row of seats, which seemed insurmountable. Sam reminded herself that the place was indeed converted from an old coliseum, but that didn't mean she had to like the architecture any.
"Well?" Marril asked David.
"Yes, yes," David said. He didn't look all that confident. "Why do we even need to get up on the roof, again?"
"One of Kenneth's hunches," Sam said. "One in a series of what has apparently been so far some scarily accurate hunches."
A gunshot broke the conversation, loud enough that Sam's ears rung, and scored a deep crack in the wall behind her. She counted herself lucky there was no shrapnel or anything. Before she even knew what she was doing, she ducked onto the stairs and took cover behind a seat.
A second gunshot rang, but there wasn't any impact sound. Sam looked over to David, who had his arm outstretched and a pained expression on his face. A small bullet was floating in front of his arm by about two or three metres. David looked like he was holding his breath, until he suddenly exhaled, dropped his arm, and the bullet whizzed past him.
Sam looked over to the shooter. It was a woman with blonde curls and a black miniskirted Team Rocket uniform, and a very ugly beret. This, if she remembered Kenneth's quick primer right, was Domino.
Domino lost no momentum, either, taking another shot at David, which missed. The look of fear on David's face was quite real, however. Domino then noticed Marril trying to sneak up on her and took yet another shot. Sam didn't know how strong Orthan Pokémon were, but she was pretty sure Marril couldn't withstand a shot.
Marril's reaction speed was insane, Sam noticed, as the shot went completely wide as Marril ducked off to the side. She took a deep breath and landed an Ice Beam right on Domino's right hand. Domino screamed as it was encased in a block of ice, frantically smashing the block against the coliseum wall.
"She can't take it," Marril snickered mockingly at Domino.
"Screw you," Domino grumbled, reaching with her left hand behind her, but Marril nailed that too with an Ice Beam. Marril rushed at Domino and ducked low, sweeping her leg out and tripping her to the ground.
"You people are what made me like this," Marril said with venom in her voice.
"You going to finish me or not?" Domino winced. Sam could tell the cold was unbearable, and she could imagine. She'd had frostbite before, but actually having parts of your body encased in ice would be far worse.
"Not unless David wants to," Marril shrugged at David. "I'm not a killer... I'm better than you."
David smiled weakly at this, and Sam knew exactly why.
"Hey, Sam," David said, "How long do you figure it'd take for a whole block of ice to melt in this weather?"
Domino's eyes grew wide.
"Quite a long time," Sam got David's implication.
"It'd hurt quite a lot, too," Marril snickered. She took a deep breath and breathed out an Ice Beam at Domino, who was cowering, looking exceedingly afraid, and chanting a quiet mantra of "not my day, not my day" to herself. Marril left Domino's head and most of her chest unfrozen so she could still breathe.
"Come on," Marril said with a distinctly malevolent glint in her eyes, "Let's go."
When they got a fair enough ways away that Domino was out of earshot, Sam asked, "You know what we just did there, right?"
"Subjected a Rocket Elite to what could be hours of nonstop pain and lingering frostbite that'll have her suffering for days?" Marril shrugged.
Sam winced. She hadn't expected Marril to be quite so blunt.
"Sam," David sounded like he didn't quite know how to put what he was thinking into words, "Not everything can be so idealistic... Domino was a Rocket Elite, she knew what she was in for when she took the job. She did things, worse things, to others. In simple terms, she was an enemy, and this isn't the time to worry about right and wrong. You just have to do what you have to do, and not question it."
"That's wartime logic," Sam grumbled.
"Being shot at is a pretty clear indication of war," Marril pointed out, stopping to stretch. She leaned against the wall and continued, "Domino didn't look like she much cared if David lived or died. She also didn't seem to care where she aimed at me, either. I don't think she'd give any mercy to you either."
"Doesn't mean we have to be cruel," Sam pointed out.
"Cruel is relative... neither of us wanted to kill her," David remarked. "She didn't seem like she'd care if any of us died."
"We should get going," Marril said, a certain seriousness now in her voice.
"Fine," Sam didn't like the idea of letting it hang like that, but she didn't want to get too involved and let anything bad happen either. She looked around. "Kenneth said Vashou and Buson would be on this level."
David closed his eyes. Sam wasn't sure how David was going to find them, but he pointed forward and said, "They're over that way, on top of the coliseum."
"Think you can lift us up there?" Sam asked.
"I'll try," David didn't sound all that confident. His eyes flashed the creepy blue they did whenever he performed anything telekinetic.
Nothing happened.
David growled to himself and closed his eyes.
Nothing happened.
"Goddish damn it," David growled, sounding exceedingly frustrated. "I can't manage anything. Not with that... thing down there."
"That bad, eh?" Marril said. She stopped to think for a few moments, then took a step forward. "I have an idea."
"Go ahead," David shrugged.
Marril crouched down and pondered the situation. She said, "This is going to be messy" and stood up, taking three distinct steps back. Sam knew Marril was going to do something very messy indeed if she'd admitted to it, so she gave Marril a ton of clearance. David didn't seem to catch on to this.
Taking a few strange, DDR-like dance steps, Marril whirled around and a wave of water came up around her. She swept her arm out, and the wave struck the wall with a thud. Not losing any momentum, Marril swept her left arm out and a blizzard struck the wave, freezing it on the spot.
David, not having given Marril enough room, was thoroughly soaked.
Sam was not.
"Well," Marril said, turning around and indicating her handiwork, with a very annoying grin reminescent of one of Kenneth's on her face, "What do you think of that?"
"I think I'm wet," David said.
"Well, no helping that," Marril looked over the large mass of ice. "Gimme a sec and I'll even make some handholds in this."
Marril got to work breaking off the icicles and knocking some good-sized indentations into the thing with her hand. Sam wondered if it hurt any, but remembered something about Marril not really being able to feel any kind of acute pain.
"There," Marril said when she'd finished. "We should be able to get up now."
Sam wondered if she'd fall at all as she strode up to the thing and began the climb up. It wasn't any great height but she was quite averse to pain. Falling would cause that.
"You could move a bit faster, you know," Marril said from on top of the coliseum walls. Sam muttered to herself and pulled herself all the way up.
It was quite windy at the top, was the first thing she noticed. The second was that the wall, about two or three metres wide, seemed impossibly narrow from this height. The multiple-story drop to the pavement below didn't seem that enticing, either. Sam didn't really worry too much about her footing, as she was more concerned irrationally about the air drag from her open jacket putting a large enough unbalanced force on her enough to knock her over, or worse, off the wall.
"Well, would you look at that," Marril was crouched down on one knee and was squinting across the coliseum. "Over there, look, two Rockets setting up some kind of sniper rifle."
"A sniper rifle?" Sam wondered aloud. That definitely wasn't Team Rocket's style. It seemed excessively bloody and violent. Then again, Kenneth had established nothing if not that Team Rocket's style was changing because of these Elites.
"We should get going," Marril said. It was weird seeing her in a completely businesslike demeanour.
"Think we'd have any better luck with our Pokémon?" Sam asked. "Gilgamesh could probably—"
"A Dragonite is going to get noticed," Marril cut Sam off. "Mercury would work well. David, Graveler."
"At least we know who's in charge," David mumbled as he took a pokéball off his belt and dropped it unceremoniously to the ground. His Graveler came out with a slight flash, and the ball returned to David's hand.
Sam didn't like it, but she reluctantly dug out Mercury's pokéball and called out her Metang.
"Okay, Graveler," David said, "We're going to do this psychically."
"Graveler?" It asked.
"Just means I'm going to direct this psychically. It's faster than shouting orders."
"Grav," the Pokémon nodded.
"Mercury, you and Graveler should be at the front," Sam said. "I know that they're probably packing guns, and that it hurts a lot to be hit by one, but you two can take a bullet and live. Rest of us can't."
"Tang," Metang's voice was suprisingly deep.
"Come on," Marril said. "We should hurry this up."
This was definitely one of those moments where you just look at what you're doing and wonder not only why you're doing it but how you got there in the first place. When she first left Cerulean six years before, she'd never imagined she'd be on top of the Neo League Stadium, getting ready to jump two Rocket Elites in the name of one Rocket Executive, alongside a psychic and a Pokémon genetic experiment done by Team Rocket itself.
Way too much Team Rocket influence, Sam noted.
"Okay, let's go," Marril said for about the second or third time.
Time seemed to stand still for Sam as the world moved around her. Moving in midair was like moving through a fog as she followed Mercury and Graveler over the large wall of the coliseum towards the Rocket Elites.
The taller of the two, the blonde one, which Sam guessed was Buson, noticed them first. He turned his side to them and pulled a handgun out from his Team Rocket vest.
"Mercury, Protect!" Sam didn't even give the order consciously. It came from out of nowhere, but the glowing shield in front of Mercury stopped several bullets cold.
"Graveler, Rollout!" David shouted as the Protect faded.
Curling up into a tight ball, Graveler rolled forward at great speed, catching both Vashou and Buson off their feet and crushing the sniper emplacement they were setting up. Graveler halted, turned around, and came back at a startled Buson, pinning the man to the ground.
Marril's Ice Beam had already frozen Vashou to the ground. Sam really should have felt relieved, but she felt tense if anything. Sure they'd just beaten three Rocket Elites, but it seemed like their luck was going to run out at any moment.
"David," Sam said as the adrenaline began to wane ever so slightly, "I thought you couldn't do anything psychic with Tribo out there?"
"Not telekinetic," David explained. "Telepathic I can kind of do... saves the need to ask these two anything, though. The reason they were so distracted and didn't notice us was because they were talking to Elite Ryan down there," David indicated the coliseum arena, "and were trying to get this thing set up right. It's not pleasant what they were going to do."
"What was that?"
"Take out Kenneth, and try for Izumi and Mikhail before chaos set in and sniping became too hard."
Sam winced. David winced too, but for a different reason.
"What was that?" Sam asked.
"It's..." David's voice was fearful, but what he saw behind Sam had shut him up. "Oh Goddish."
Sam turned around. Marril looked dumbstruck. So, there it was, the most feared Pokémon on the planet, the Pokémon they had all secretly wished wouldn't come, had arrived. It was close enough to be visible, flying in low just above eye level with Sam. It passed by her without so much as a second glance, and headed in to the arena.
Mewtwo had come.
---------------------------------------------------
That's it for this week, folks. Next chapter goes up when it goes up. Until then, remember that this is not your kiddie Mewtwo we're talking about here. Anyway, like I noted several times in the narration (and I do love dramatic irony), I feel this one was a bit contrived, mainly that a 16-year old and an 18-year old (or 19-year old... embarrassing of me to forget like that) could beat three adult, experienced Rocket Elites, but that's just the overpoweredness of a psychic and an Orthan Pokémon (Marril sure hasn't been seen in a while, anyway) at work. Anyway, if anyone was wondering why David was able to deflect a bullet at the start, and unable to do anything later on, it's because Tribo was still fighting at that point, and wasn't able to full-out block things.